The “Atlas of the Danube countries” — a large-region atlas of Austrian cartography

Summary

W. Stams reviews the conception, compilation and published sheets of the Atlas of the Danubian Countries, whose loose-leaf publication began in 1970 after about twelve years of preparation and was still incomplete. Conceived after Austria's 1955 declaration of neutrality to support a research bridge between East and West, the project originated at the Austrian Institute for East and Southeast European Studies. Wilfried Krallert prepared its first draft and edited it until 1963; Josef Breu took over in 1964 and secured financial and technical arrangements in 1966. The federal surveying office undertook reproduction and printing. Contributors from Danubian countries supplied materials and prepared maps. Four-language texts and legends accompany names in official national languages. At a principal scale of 1:2,000,000, the atlas covers six states completely and adjoining territories, although it excludes part of the western Danube catchment. Stams praises the reconciliation of heterogeneous multilingual sources, representation of actual spatial distributions and combination of several information layers. He finds the geological synthesis successful and the geomorphological map exceptionally detailed, while criticizing coarse relief depiction and some climatic boundaries. His assessment also covers population and economic maps: population-distribution symbols obscure settlement patterns, and administrative-area cartograms seriously weaken demographic comparisons. Agricultural maps often communicate clearly, but land-use generalization, electricity and transport symbols, and sparse industrial explanations attract criticism. He judges the tourism map to show accommodation infrastructure and state investment more clearly than tourist activity. General weaknesses include missing or inconspicuous reference dates, inadequate explanation of source disparities and harmonization, cumbersome multilingual text sheets, and the absence of an integrated regional account. Stams nevertheless regards the atlas as a highly commendable scientific achievement and recommends dated contents, a concluding synthesis, more manageable explanatory texts and a smaller, inexpensive edition.